Meteors in New Zealand: Security guard spots strange glare on mall footage

Andrew Savage was working the security guard late shift at Bayfair Mall when he saw a strange glare light up one of the security screens.

When he went to review the footage, he saw a light falling from the sky believed to be a meteor.

“It was pretty cool to have captured it because you don’t see something like that very often,” Savage said.

The footage was taken at 2.41am on Sunday and Savage said it fell near Farm St in Mount Maunganui.

Tauranga Astronomical Society president David Grieg said it was a slightly bigger than average meteor.

“Our cameras weren’t facing in the right direction to pick it up last night but it would have been a good one to see,” Grieg said.

“Thousands of meteors burn up over New Zealand each month although significant ones are less frequent.”

Grieg said if the meteor landed on Earth, it would have been out at sea as the direction from the video showed it to be travelling north-east.

According to Nasa, meteors are bits of rocks and ice ejected from comets as they move in their orbits about the sun. A meteor that reaches the ground is called a meteorite.

Nasa says meteors are sometimes observed with red, yellow or green trails, caused by the ionisation of molecules like oxygen, which appears green.

There are about 12,000 meteors on any given night that are about the size of a piece of dust.

Harriet Laughton is a multimedia journalist based in the Bay of Plenty.